March 2006

Charlie Schaubel called me last Saturday morning. "Hey, John," he said, "I’ve got a place to teach."

If you read my last blog – "Focusing on the target" – then you know that I took golf lessons from Charlie last year. But the driving range where he taught had been sold, and after 35 years in the business, he had no place to work. He had tried other facilities in the area, and been turned down. He was running out of money, he was tired and he was depressed.

Oddly enough, I was going through a rough patch myself, and it is one of the curious aspects of life that what you can’t or won’t see about yourself invariably shows up in people around you.

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I called Charlie Schaubel last weekend thinking that maybe he could straighten me out. I hadn’t hit a clean 5 iron shot since late summer, and I wasn’t doing so well at life, either.

I met Charlie last year when I took up golf. He was teaching at a driving range, and had we not spoken first by phone I would have driven right past the place. The building needed painting, the balls were crummy, the range was shabby, the putting green looked like the surface of the moon.
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I had an acting job yesterday which was shot at an old-fashioned diner near a high school in midtown. One of the other actors was B, a man with whom I studied acting two years ago when I was just getting into the business.

Since we were both extras, we spent much of the morning sitting in plastic chairs in the parking lot waiting to be called to the set while steam from the dry cleaners next door blew past like fast-moving clouds.

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